Short Cuts

Short Cuts

Adapting several short stories by the Pacific Northwest author Raymond Carver and transplanting them to a bristling early-90s Los Angeles, Altman deploys his trademark restless camera coupled with overlapping, densely layered sound to concentrate on the idea of the American family in the Reagan-Bush era while exploring dominant notions of masculinity and marital fidelity. As the several stories in the film begin to intertwine, a complex tapestry emerges—each connected to each other by thin strands. A who’s-who cast (including Robert Downey, Jr., Andie MacDowell, Tim Robbins, Lyle Lovett, and Julianne Moore, among others) flesh out Altman’s anxiety-ridden vision of modern America to create “A rich, unnerving film, as comic as it is astringent.”—Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times.

THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK displayed Altman’s iconoclastic fascinations: a sensitivity to schisms within normalcy, a fascination with female subjectivity, and the construction of atmospheres as expressive of psychological states. Sandy Dennis portrays Frances Austen, a young spinster living in a well-appointed apartment in Vancouver, where she listlessly entertains an older suitor and engages …

Following his enormously successful M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, with its deliberately faltering beginning and wandering narrative line, took a determinedly different direction. It tells the story of a boy (Bud Cort) who yearns to fly. Hiding out in the Houston Astrodome under the mentorship of a bird woman (Sally Kellerman), he builds a pair of life-size …

Robert Altman made a long career out of films that challenged the idea that actions stemming from rampant consumerism or the vile effects of toxic masculinity were in any way natural. With 3 Women, Altman delivers one of his finest artistic statements, charting the relationship between three broken women: Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall), who works …

As a tribute to, or perhaps in contempt of, the noir detective story, Altman subverts genre convention by re-imagining the usually hard-boiled character of Philip Marlowe as a nebbish private eye. Elliot Gould plays Marlowe, who digs himself deep into trouble when he decides to investigate the murder of a friend. Based on the book …